Why is career change hard?

One of the most difficult things to do for ourselves is change. There is a comfort level in what we already know and do. We understand the current problems in our jobs and are used to them. We know the aspects we like and what we don’t like. And while we may want to like our current situation, we are oddly comfortable with it. That is part of the problem.

We have all heard of the saying that we need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means that we need to be accept that we are never completely comfortable with where we are at, but we understand that 100% comfort is not normally possible. So, if we know these things, why is it that we can’t make the change that we know we need to make. Why is that we continue think through things that we already have the answer to. The answer is that we want to make change in our careers but we don’t need to make changes in our careers. Our want for a career change is not as big as our need for the status quo.

When you need to do something, it becomes more of a focus of our time. When we need to make a career change then we feel like the time for running the same mental conversation through our minds is over. Once it becomes a need, we must act. Even if it is just getting more information to make a decision, we are taking new actions. When we need to make a change, we will come to a place where we are honest with what we have done, the information we have, and what we need to do. We know that regardless of where we are now we appreciate one important point: our need to make a career change will place us in a new role and at the beginning it will be uncomfortable.

Our uneasiness with change comes from a lot of different places. Fear of rejection, failure, and the opinion of others come to mind quickly. The truth is that there will be some of that along the way. However, it has been said that to be something that you have never been, we need to do something we have never done. It makes a lot of sense because if we could already have what we want without feeling uncomfortable then we would already have it. It is also why career changes must be things we need to do for us to get pass the energy barrier of comfort and familiar.

The good thing is that we have experience learning to do things that we could not do at first. Scientists are asked to do experiments that can and do fail all the time, but we know that we will learn something from those experiments that and it will lead to a change in our understanding of a process. We can make career change and learn to do something new. The question is do you want to change careers or do you need to?